Before Christmas, I was asked to volunteer to do giftwrapping for a charity. I was going to say no, only because I was a terrible gift wrapper, but I decided to finally remove a weakness I’ve had for over 50 years… despite being a good origamist who can fold paper like most people can’t!

 

My problem with gift wrapping was that I just never got my thoughts together for what to do in wrapping something! It was as simple as that! Any time someone handed me something to wrap, I’d just look at it and kind of wing it wherever my mind happened to go for an idea to try!

However, having been new to TikTok of late, I recalled several videos of wrapping fed through the somewhat random feed algorithms to see what I might like to watch and not. So I went searching and man! Did I ever find a LOT of crazy gift wrapping “tutorials”!!!

I put “tutorials” in quotes because most of them weren’t all that good. Sure, they showed you the steps, though often fairly quickly, but that was easy enough to control and slow down to learn. What they often didn’t tell you was the proportion of paper to be used! Not so much width to height, but those dimensions relative to the package being wrapped! That was really painstaking to decipher through many tests I did with craft paper at home.

 

Despite that challenge, I persisted and I am delighted to report that people were thrilled with the gifts I wrapped for them, some of which are shown below! There was a LOT of head nodding and shaking when they saw some of the giftwrapping they got back. I did reasonably well to attain my goal of wrapping things so nicely that recipients would feel some guilt about opening them!

 

Take one weakness off my list of many weaknesses, baby! Solved in a few weeks! Don’t you wish all weaknesses could be solved as easily and as well???

Now, to maintain my skills, I offer free gift wrapping to anybody I know who can meet me or drop off the gift to me to wrap, with their own wrapping paper so I don’t choose something they don’t like. I don’t have enough money to give away that many gifts to wrap and upkeep my new skills. Let’s see how many will take me up on it!